Legos have been played with. Leaders have created their plans for people and transit. Gov. Chris Gregoire has extrolled the benefits of compact communities, and Washington’s role as an international leader. In short, Reality Check 2008 is halfway under way and will soon be done (for a definition of Reality Check, see the post directly below).

The fact that so many regional leaders are playing with Legos is definitly interesting and will no doubt be the major focus of the plethora of different news organizations that are here from NPR to TV to print papers. But something else is happening beneath the surface of the Legos… people are listening to the concerns of other regional leaders they might not necessarily otherwise hear.

That’s one of the main points of this excercise, said Greg Johnson, ULI Seattle chair and president of Wright Runstad & Co. For example, members of my table included representatives of Microsoft, Fort Lewis, a Snohomish County economic council member, and the Washington Roundtable. Other people at my table were Seattle City Council Member Sally Clark, Seattle developer Jim Soules, Executive Director of the Puget Sound Clean Air Agnecy Dennis McLeran and Bert Gregory, president of CEO of Mithun.

Representatives of ULI said they spent an awful lot of time planning those tables, and making sure differnet groups were represented, to come up with broader solutions.

What do you think? Will this event come to anything, or will it become yet another regional plan that people trumpet as the next big thing, then forget about a month later? Does this region have any hope of coming up with a comprehensive plan to deal with density, jobs and people?

If you live in an area that has went through this excercise already - Sacramento, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles…. have you seen any differences because of this process? Tell me what you think, you never know who may be listening.

I’m about to head out to Reality Check 2008, along with 250 of my closest business, environment, political and civic leader friends.

Held at the University of Washington and presented by the Urban Land Institute, it’s a high profile day-long event where leaders in their field come together to play with Legos. Yes, I’m serious. After a series of welcome speeches, the 250 leaders will do a planning exercise that uses Legos to represent people, transit and other things. They will physically plan for where a whole lot of people projected to come to this area by 2040 - 1.7 million people and 1.2 million jobs, to be exact - will go.

Perhaps the most impressive thing is the guest list, and the group of people ULI has been able to get it one place. Attendees should include Gov. Chris Gregoire, U.S. Sen. Maria Cantwell, Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels, the mayors of Auburn, Redmond, Bothell, Sumner, Lynnwood (and other cities), and an impressive list of council members from different city and civic councils.

On the business front, there’s going to be representatives from Mithun, CamWest Development, Vulcan Inc., Microsoft, Opus Northwest, Wright Runstad and Co., Boeing, and Uwajimaya. Most of the attendees are high level executives, if not presidents. Basically, anybody who is anybody in planning and development is going to be there (or at least is sending a representative). The event is by invitation only.

The exercise has already been done in Washington, D.C. and Sacramento. For more information on it, press here. I’ll keep you updated as it moves along.

Readers, you liked the post that directly preceded this one, about how Anne Whitacre, a specifier for Gehry Partners in Los Angeles questioned the claims of green products. In fact, you liked it so much that the long version of it (after  you click ‘more’) directly shot up to the most popular post I’ve ever written.

People read it from Lansing, Mich., from Salt Lake City, from Washington, D.C., from Atlanta, and all throughout Washington and Oregon.

We got interesting comments in our mailbox after running the full editorial too. One reader named Jason wrote, “BINGO! I think Anne nailed it. The second Green design became more about paper work and check lists, is the second green design failed.”  

Another said, “Finally, bang on, thanks for posting that.”

A third said, “People need to use intellect and reason to evaluate the results or benefits of these ideas in relation to short term and long term costs. Further ’sustainable’ does not always mean better and certainly does not mean more efficient. These concepts are meant to make us ‘feel good’ and provide comfort for some imagined guilt for having a successful culture.”

Here’s what I have to say: thank you for responding! My job (and the job of any credible journalist) is to report both sides to the best of my ability, though often (in non-DJC publications of course) I see that only one side of the story gets told. Your thoughts help me see the whole story, so thank you for your input in either direction.

READERS: I am more than happy to investigate these topics and sound them out, but I need to know what you care about. If you like (or don’t like) what we’re doing, comment or e-mail me at katiez@djc.com. If you like (or don’t like) parts of green design, green buildings, green products etc., comment or e-mail me at katiez@djc.com. I promise that I read all my comments and all my e-mails, and want to hear what you have to say, both good and bad.

We have been up and running for just over a month now. Thanks for reading and thanks for your comments. Keep ‘em coming!

Often, I long for your comments though they never come. In response to my post below on the Stranger’s not so pleasant coverage of Seattle City Hall, I got more than I bargained for from Anne Whitacre.

Whitacre is a senior associate at Gehry Partners in Los Angeles, though she spent 30 years working in Seattle at firms like ZGF and NBBJ. She’s a full-time specifier there and deals with products, both green and not green, on a daily basis.

Whitacre isn’t against green buildings or green products as a whole… rather her qualm is how a product’s ”greenness” often trumps whether it actually is a good product.

Among her comments in her very informative letter to me, she said, “I simply do not understand the bally-hooing of LEED buildings. From a design professional’s perspective, there are “good” buildings and there are “bad” buildings, and the procuring of a LEED rating does not automatically turn a “bad” building into a “good” one.”

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The Stranger, Seattle’s alternative weekly, is notorious for being especially skeptical of… well, everything. In this week’s issue, the paper takes on Seattle City Hall in honor of the announcement that Seattle has more LEED certified buildings than any other city in the country (see my post below on that).

Erica C. Barnett’s article concentrates on the building’s solar panels, which according to The Stranger, were never purchased or hooked up, and the “splash effect” of waterless urinals. To read what The Stranger has to say, click here. 

The Seattle City Hall

This isn’t the first time the seat of Seattle government has faced harsh criticism. In July 2005, the Seattle PI blasted the new building for its energy use. To read that story, click here. The DJC wrote a story about those claims in 2005 here. This February, I wrote a story about the future of LEED and lawsuits here, which looked at the PI’s City Hall allegations. 

The point is, these issues are out there and bring to light problems in the green building world, especially in LEED certification, which does not currently look at how a building lives up to its promises, or performs over time.

What do you think? If you work in City Hall, what is your experience? If you work with green projects, are these problems more commonplace than most realize?

Most importantly, if The Stranger’s claims hold water…. was a green city hall worth your tax dollars? Is it better to have a LEED-gold building with problems, or no LEED building at all? Let me know what you think!

I know I’ve questioned the validity of ratings before but this one is pretty cut and dry: according to the USGBC, Seattle has the most LEED certified buildings of any city in the country.

So what does that mean? Seattle has the most LEED certified buildings, but does that make it the greenest city?

Not according to a whole host of previous green city ratings - I wrote about that topic and Corvallis, Ore., being the greenest city earlier this year (to see it look under topic ratings below).

So Seattle’s got the most LEED certified buildings. Why? Is it the city’s policy of requiring projects that get public funding to be LEED silver (after all 10 of the LEED certified buildings are owned by the city of Seattle including Seattle City Hall). Is it a critical mass of green-oriented architects in the city? Is it incentives? What do you think? Comment and tell me what in Seattle really made LEED take off.

If we take a step back from Seattle, Washington State isn’t doing too bad itself. According to Cascadia’s latest Greenbuilder newsletter (an excellent source of information that I would recommend anyone interested in regional green building sign up for) as of April 3, the regional stats look like this:

Washington has 83 LEED certified projects with another 503 registered, or on the boards. Oregon has 69 certified projects and 315 registered. British Columbia has 32 certified projects and 199 registered. And Alaska has three certified projects and 22 registered.

And check out the other cities that round out the list of top five. They are (in order): Portland, Chicago, Washington, D.C., and Grand Rapids, Mich. Pretty much the usual subjects, though some of you might be doing a double take at Grand Rapids. The city is actually quite a green leader and has a lot of new construction going on. For a more localized explanation, though written in 2006, check out the Rapid Growth site at http://www.rapidgrowthmedia.com/features/sustain16.aspx.

By the way my blogging program is acting up… hopefully tomorrow it will let me do everything it’s supposed to like make links. More on this tomorrow!

Yesterday, the American Institute of Architects Committee on the Environment announced its high profile list of the top ten greenest projects in the country. One of them is from Seattle.

For any of you that don’t know this competition, this is a very….. big….. deal. For those of you that do know it, do you think it should be as big a deal as it is? And are these really the greenest projects in the country? What do you think?

The winning Seattle entry was the South Lake Union Discovery Center by Miller/Hull (at left). I’d tell you more about it, but there’s been lots written on this unique modular building that is designed to break about in four pieces, move to another location and be reconfigured. If you want to learn more about it, read a story I wrote on it last summer here.

It’s also worth noting that this project did not win the regional version of this award…. judges at the AIA Seattle COTE mentioned it and praised its ability to move, but said its lack of “living environment” led the panel to pick another project as a regional winner.  To see the projects they chose, click here. Which judging team do you think made the right decision?

Like I said, this award is a big deal. The only other project to win the award this year on the West Coast was the Nueva School, Hillside Learning complex outside San Francisco (at left). Other winners this year were in New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Wisconsin, Louisiana, Pennsylvania, and Arizona.

The Queens Botanical Visitor & Administration Building in Flushing, New York is pictured above right. Below left is the Cesar Chavez Library in Laveen, Ariz. Below right is the Pocono Environmental Education Center in Dingman’s Ferry, Penn.

I could talk about these projects for hours, but really, I just want to show you the pictures. The AIA’s Web site is a comprehensive source of information. For an overview, go here. To learn more about a specific project, go to the link at left and click on any underlined project’s name. For an overview, see my story here . For more pictures, check out the slideshow that goes with my story, currently on the Web site at www.djc.com.

By the way, it’s clear from these pictures that the accessory of the year was the slanted roof, eh? What do you think the accessory of next year is going to be? And check below for my first posting on green buildings galore!

Today is green project day at the DJC because there’s just so much to report. It’s also Earth Day and I meant to write a post about the silly earth themed product advertisements I got in my inbox, but that will just have to wait until later, while we get to what you really love…. projects!

In fact there’s so much to cover, it will be written in two posts: this one and another following it.

First we’ve got the winning project called Eco-Laboratory from the Cascadia Region Emerging Green Builder program’s Natural Talent Design Competition. The competition was open to students or anyone in their job less than five years. This year, it asked entrants to design a living building (for more on that, click here).

The winning entry was a team from Seattle’s Weber Thompson. Team members were Brian Geller, Myer Harrell, Chris Dukehart and Dan Albert. The entry, which is purely theoretical and will not be built (at least in the near future), was sited next to the 7,200-square-foot p-patch in Belltown at the corner of Elliott Avenue and Vine St.

The team used what was already on site, from the garden, to a high homeless population, to an active community, to inspire the design of the building. Judges liked that and thought it truly incorporated the idea behind a living building.

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Dear reader, it is time to put your analytical (or more likely guessing) powers to the test: what exactly is it you see in the photo to the left?

If you said a mini-mansion, most likely inhabited by a couple or prim family of four, you are dead wrong. Instead, it’s a model of dense urban living that houses ten people in eight bedrooms.

This is where I stayed last week while attending Cascadia’s Living Future Conference in Vancouver, B.C. It’s a charming space that a developer bought, renovated and began renting out to young professionals and students in January.

It’s bright, daylit, airy and dense. It’s clean and well lit and is filled with amicable students and young professionals, including my sister. It’s within walking distance from a number of shops, bars and restaurants in a trendy family neighborhood. It’s a street away from a bus line and only a couple of the house’s inhabitants even have cars.

My only question? Why doesn’t this happen more.

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I must say, I have never been to a presentation where the first thing the speaker does is take his shirt off. I know I shouldn’t focus on this, but it’s true and definitely leaves an impression, especially when that speaker is Sim Van der Ryn, a leading pioneer in ecological design. 

Ryn took his shirt, a very nice red checked dress one, off to don the new t-shirt of the Living Future Conference, here in Vancouver, B.C. The shirt is charcoal and has a simple message on its front that says ‘living.’ 

Jason McLennan, CEO of Cascadia, introduced Ryn as the “father and grandfather of the green design movement.” To learn about the many things Ryn has done in his career, press here.

Ryn spoke about beauty, inspiration and design. Being a conference largely focused on sustainability, you’d expect him to address that topic. He did at the end of his talk in a way that might have shocked some in the audience as he announced that he did not like the term one bit.

“It’s there, we’re going to keep using it, but I don’t like it,” he said. “Part of it is wound up in the metrics… the reality is we don’t have the metrics to measure this stuff.”

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